Monday, April 29, 2013

Sunday Wrap Up 4/28/2013: 50k in a day and LS Update

This week was absolutely phenomenal for me. Granted, my raid team is still stuck on Horridon, but that fight is dumb and no one likes pink dinosaurs anyways. In the gold-making side of the game, it was a great week.
World of Warcraft Druid Travel Form gold
Creatures kneel before my gold making skills.
First of all, I made a lot. Had one day where I logged in to over 50k in sales. Those days don't happen a lot, but when they do, they're really exciting. Normal days are 3k-10k in sales, of which about 25-50% of which is profit by my crafting setup. But 50k and you haven't even reposted?! That's the kind of stuff where you go out and spend real money celebrating! It was a mix of Living Steel, Mega Blues, Glyphs, Meta Gems, Blacksmithing, Transmog, and a few high priced items, but nothing special like the 502 weapons. Just run of the mill items.

Second, I got to help a friend. While I have an alt or two, I'm not an altoholic, so there's not a lot to spend my gold on. A buddy that I used to run arena's with just levelled and geared a Fury Warrior, named Howtowarrior. I play warrior, so his confidence in naming makes me smile. Thing is though,  he didn't really know how to play fury. But, he's a good guy, and just like he taught me not to run over hunter traps in 2v2, I taught him not to gem mastery. It was a fun day and I was able to buy him some gear, enchant him, and spend some time working on what is actually a decently complicated rotation (17 buttons in 3 GCDs). Funny thing was though, while I have been annoyed by others who ask for gold and enchants, I was happy to help him out. Sure, he's my friend, but it is endearing when someone comes to you with an open mindset, willing to learn. You know, "Hey, I have an hour to kill, and I'm not pulling the numbers I should. Do you have time to help me find the problem?" Not only did we bond more as in game friends (we haven't actually talked in probably a year or so) but, hey, he probably got 20k in free stuff. Also, he doubled his dps. So, there's that. /target [self] /pat back

NEWS
5.3 updates are in full swing! If you haven't read them, get on it and start reading up on what's going to be changing come the new patch. It'll still be a ways out, but now is the time to start any speculation. www.mmo-champion.com

UPDATES
I did a little Living Steel play last week and it has panned out pretty well, but not to the point where prices have doubled or anything. I bought LS at 375 gold, and posted them at 1000. Everyone gawked and immediately posted their inventory at 400g. So I bought it, and reposted at 900. They gawked again and reposted at 425. So I bought it and reposted at 700. They shuttered and slammed me in trade chat. They also posted more inventory at 450. So I bought that and reposted that at 700. All the bit players saw prices increased and started posting daily cooldowns at 500-700. I couldn't buy out this and maintain price increases, so I kept my 100-200 LS up at the crazy prices and sold a couple stacks at 600g, happy with the profit. Meanwhile, it seems like the higher priced ones were just reasonable enough to raise the mean and median on Auctioneer and TUJ so that the key players on the server started posting higher. Prices are about 600g now and I'm selling about 5-10 bars a day at 30-50% profit. :) Took a little time but it worked.

EARNINGS
World of Warcraft glyph posting toon gold making
Fabulous dress, dahling. And is this your...date?
Glyph poster: 
Glyph Revenue: 4,176g
Average # of Postings: ~320

Wold of warcraft WoW posting toon banking toon WTBGold
 He cuts down trees. He eats his lunch.
Main Poster:
Lumberjack Revenue: 71,373g
Min # of Postings: 117
Max # of Postings: 581
Average # of Posting: 400-410

Total Auctioning Revenue: 75,549g
Avg # of Posting: 720
Revenue per Posting: 105g/post
World of Warcraft WoW WTBGold Reckles

My Pride and Joy
Total Gold: 158k (+49k)
Total Value of Auctions: 504k (+34k)
Total Wealth: 662k (+83k)


That's all for now, I did find a way to consistently mine up 40 stacks an hour so I'll be putting out a run down of that in a day or two. Subscribe for that! Until then remember to

Search. Craft. Post.
Every Day.

Monday, April 22, 2013

Beginner's Guide to Blacksmithing in Patch 5.2

World of Warcraft Beginners Guide to Blacksmithing Tradeskillmaster TSM
Pardon the cheesy banner, but I'm still new at the art side of this and I thought it was funny. Hush. :P Ok, so, today on Twitter I received this message from @JamesStorrie:
I just levelled bs and engineering can you point me in the right direction on how to make gold with these thanks
Well as a matter of fact, James, yes. Yes I can. In a nutshell, with any crafting profession, get all the current patterns, craft everything profitable that you can afford the mats for, and then post them. I know blacksmithing so I'll go through that,  but for engineering talk to @NotQuiteExalted, @ssmith0911, or @powerwordgold. Doing this without addons can take hours though, and it's in learning how to operate the addons where the specific "how to" comes in. So, without further ado, here are the prerequisite addons. Go to Curse.com to download these (if you're new to addons, they're virus free, and you don't need to subscribe or pay to download them).

ADDONS
Tradeskillmaster TSM Banner
Oh, TSM! How did I live without you? 
TradeSkillMaster - This automates and simplifies EVERYTHING that has to do with crafting. Huge round of applause to Sapu and his team for putting this together. Get the whole suite: Accounting, Additions, AuctionDB, Auctioning, Crafting, Mailing Etc.
The Undermine Journal GE - This show's you the global median and mean price for any item on the auction house. It does a bunch of other stuff to, but it essentially takes away the need to search the auction house, and allows for automated price efficiency (if prices worldwide go up, the prices for your posts will too). It also integrates with TSM. (Optionally, there is a Realm Edition, RE, on theunderminejournal.com that is useful for mat prices, as mat prices as more stable globally than locally)
Auctioneer - I use this less than I used to now that I utilize TSM more fully, but it has it's moments and is an overall improvement over the standard Auction House UI.
MogIt - This shows you an image of any item. In our case, it's great for considering whether or not to craft transmog items.
Postal - Makes looting your mailbox a lot easier and faster. Trust me, it's worth it.

Cullen Hammerbrow World of warcraft
Cullen and I go way back.
PATTERNS
1. If you haven't already, learn all the basic patterns from the normal trainer.
2. Browse Cullen Hammerbrow's (righteous Alliance) or Jorunga Stonehoof's (filthy Horde) goods. They sell 450 pvp and 463 pve patterns for 1 Spirit of Harmony each. Even with all the gear out there, these still sell pretty steadily as people get bored and level alts. Grind some Spirits and buy these patterns. I get between 2 and 10k profit a week from these; they pay for my repair bills.
3. Go kill Itoka. He drops a Strange Metal Ingot. In short, this opens up the 5.2 craftables: pvp blues and progressively awesome weapons. Every day, you craft one Lightning Steel out of 10 Ghost Iron Bars, and in doing so, learn a new recipe, similar to alchemy or inscription. Make sure you log on and craft your Lightning Steel every day, even if you don't plan on playing that day. These new recipes are selling like hotcakes, hotcakes that sell very very quickly.
4. Optionally, the Klaxxi start selling patterns at Honored that you can buy for 20 Kyparite. The 476 weapons take 5-8 Spirits of Harmony per craft and are a waste of Spirits in my opinion. But hey, they can still net you 2k-5k each, and are worth at least learning.

MATERIALS
1. Lots of Ghost Iron Bars. 5-15 stacks a day. Mine them if you want to, but buying off the AH is fine. I generally go on mining splurges once a month and have a decent stock at all times.
2. Trillium Bars. Find a Transmute Master guildie and transmute ghost iron bars into trillium bars. AH prices for trillium can be volatile and you might have days where you need a couple stacks.
3. Living Steel. If you read yesterday's "Week in Review" post, you know that Living Steel is about to get crazy. I recommend setting a max that you'll pay for them on the AH and buying any you find under that. Or find a transmute friend who doesn't mind giving you their daily CD.
4. Lightning Steel. This is BoP, so you only get the one's you craft, and you only get one per day.
5. Spirits of Harmony. Spirits are an art form in and of themselves, but are key to Blacksmithing so I'll put a few links and only spend a paragraph on them.

SPIRIT FARMING
When you first finish following this guide, you will probably find that you don't have enough spirits of harmony.
99 Spirits needed. Son of a...
First things first, do your dailies, and always loot everything  But for strict SoH farming, there are a couple good spots. If you have great burst AoE, I recommend the Dread Scar, in Dread Wastes; just run up and down grabbing all the warrior packs. You'll get greens and gold and about 20% more spirits from my testing than turtles, mainly due to CDs resetting during travel time. If you're a multi-dotter, farm turtles in one of two spots: the lake in Valley of the Four Winds that is located just west of the Grassy Cline flight path, or better but harder, the Northeast corner of Windward Isle in Jade Forest. For turtles, dot everything and let them die as they run to you. In addition to spirits, turtles allow you to loot the meat, bundle them into groceries for Replenishing the Pantry, and turn them into Black Pepper or Soy Sauce from Nam IronPaw, netting a very decent bonus profit. Depending on your dps, these three spots should bring in between 10 and 25 Spirits an hour. Any more than that generally gets hotfixed (RIP Zhu's Watch, you will be missed).

ridiculous world of warcraft fury warrior aoe dps
If you're SoH farming, your screen should look like this, as often as possible.

Alright, you have your profession leveled  your addons downloaded, and you know where to get materials from. How again do you make money with Blacksmithing? Here's the process.

SETTING UP TSM INVENTORY
First we setup TradesSkillMaster inventory settings.
Step 1. Open TSM with "/tsm"
Step 2. Modules are located as tabs at the top. Click Crafting. Make sure "Enable new Tradeskills" is checked.
Step 3. Click the subtab "Price/Inventory Settings." This tab determins what will be profitable. The drop downs are important but specific to your setup, so read the tooltips and fill them out accordingly. I get mat prices from AuctionDB, craft prices from AuctionDB, secondary price source as TUJ GE Market Median, Use lower of two, and have a 5% profit deduction. Make sure you have "Include items on the AH checked." Otherwise you will double craft your heart out. 
Step 4: Click the Auction Group Module tab at the top. It looks like a coin. Click "Categories/Groups" on the left and then the subtab "Create Category/Group."
Step 5: Create a new Category, NOT A GROUP, called Blacksmithing. Click Okay.
Step 5: Close TSM when you're done.

SETTING UP TSM CRAFTING QUEUES
Next we set up the TSM crafting queues. This can be tricky so I'll use screenshots, but what it does is pretty cool. You click one button, and from what you know how to craft, it determines what is profitable, based on the current realm prices and global prices. It then queues up those items so that you can click click click a different button and craft them one after another. If you don't have the materials, you go to the auction house and click "Crafting Mats"->"Search" and then just spam buyout until you're done. It automatically knows when you've bought enough. For BS, crafting mats is simple but even for tricky things like inscription where you mill herbs for ink, TSM automates everything and does the calculations for you. So, here's how you set up all this really neat time-saving stuff!
Step 1: Open TSM with "/tsm"
Step 2: Open the Blacksmithing tab at the bottom. It has a picture of an anvil.
Step 3: Click on the Green Materials section on the left. Scroll down until you see "Spirits of Harmony." These are Soulbound, so they don't have an AH value. They can be traded for two Golden Lotuses though, so we'll equate them to that. Check "Override Price Source" and "Multiple of Other Item." In "Other Item" type 72238, and click Okay. For "Price Multiplier" type 2.
Should look like this.
Step 4: Now click on the Green Options section on the left. If you don't want to craft any low level stuff or transmog (for starters, stick to current gear), check "place lower limit on ilvl" and set it at "450." Check "Override Max Restock Quantity" and set it to 1. Override minimum profit, but set that to whatever you feel comfortable with.
Should look like this.
Step 5: We're going to set up the actual queue's now. This will create both the crafting queue and the auctioning group for the item, so that both actions are automated. Go through each white group on the left "Armor-chest, Armor-feet, etc." and do each of the following steps. Start off by clicking on Armor-chest. 
Step 6: Scroll through the recipes and make sure each of the ones you want to craft have a check mark next to them.
Step 7: Click "Create Auction Groups." Category to put groups in should be "Blacksmithing" that we created earlier. How to add crafts should be "All in individual groups." The option "Groups to add crafts to" should be blank, and "Include Crafts Already in a Group" should be left unchecked. However, check the box for "Only include Enabled Crafts." This setups is less organized than some, but it allows for pricing to be automated by the market. In general, the less you have to think about posting, the better.
Step 8: Ensure that your chat window displays "Added XX crafted items to XX individual groups." (The XXs are the number of recipes added) If the words are any different, you clicked something different and TSM isn't going to be happy. Delete those groups and start that armor section again.
Step 9: Repeat Steps 5-8 for each Armor section that you can craft.
Step 10: Whenever you learn a new recipe in the future, you need to go back in and repeat steps 5-8 for that item.



Alright, first off, CONGRATULATIONS! The majority of the work is done. Now to actually craft and make some gold. 
Open up your blacksmithing; you'll notice a new tab at the top that opens up the TSM Crafting interface. At first, there shouldn't be much to look at, but based on Step 4 from "Setting up TSM Crafting Queues" the big "Restock Queue" button does something magical. Click it! Tah Dah! You should now see a nice sized list of things to craft. If it's too much, just expand "All" and right click anything you don't want to craft. 
Drakefist Hammer? Not today, son. Not today.

The list in the bottom right are the mats needed for everything in the crafting list. If you have everything, great, if not, also great! Go to your favorite Auction House and you'll find that with TSM there's a new tab at the bottom. In the TSM tab, click the word "Crafting Mats," make sure Blacksmithing selected, and hit search. Provided you have enough gold, you should be able to go though spamming the buyout button until it finishes. Loot your mailbox and Bam! You have all your mats. (For seasoned TSM veterans, sorry for the thoroughness of this, but c'mon, remember back before when you had to do all this manually? It's a really cool addon.) Finally just head on over to an anvil, and reopen the blacksmithing queue. At this poing, you should be able to stand at the anvil and just click "Craft Next" to your heart's content.

Now, before we post all your newly-minted goodies, there's one more round of one-time only settings to go through. 

SETTING UP TSM AUCTIONING GROUPS
When we were setting up the inventory, we navigated over to auctioning groups to get the Blacksmith Category made. It was out of order, but I'm a rebel. At least you know how to get there. "/tsm" -> "Auctioning Groups/Options." Well, you can play around with general posting options later, but we'll do options specific to Blacksmithing for now. 
Step 1: Click on the dark green Blacksmithing Category on the left, and click the Category Overrides subtab.
Step 2: General Settings- You can cancel your auctions in bulk by scanning the competitors auctions. Generally, standard settings are fine for this, but you can choose to ingore shorter or longer auction times if that suites you.
Step 3: Post Settings- You want the auctions to be up in stacks of 1, for as short of time as you can afford to play for. So if you're online all day every day, set the duration to 12 hours. However, if you only play 2 times a week, set it to 48 hours so it's at least up for as long as possible. Bid percent should generally be 100% of post price. This isn't ebay.
Step 4: Threshold- This is very debateable, but here's my take. As long as you're making a profit, you're fine, so I like so set it as a % of crafting cost. When it falls below this number it goes to "Advanced Price Settings" which I recommend be set to "Post at Fallback."
Step 5: Fallback- This is where it posts when you're, for all intents and purposes, the only one in the market. Also debatable, but I use either a high percentage 150%-300% of TUJ GE market median, or a decent percentage 100%-200% of TUJ GE market mean, depending on volatility.   

SUPER SECRET BONUS STEP
Go to "Auction Groups/Options"->"Options" (the green word on the left), and scroll down. See that "create macro and bind scroll wheel?" Do it.

POSTING
Now to make your gold from all the sweet loot in your bags. Head to the AH, click the TSM tab, and click "Post Auctions." (If there are any errors, ignore them for now). Let it scan all the items in your bags, then hold the control key down, and scroll your mouse wheel up and down and viola! You're done!  The cool thing is, the next day, all you have to do, is loot the gold from your mailbox, hit restock queue, buy some mats, craft next, and scroll your mouse wheel again. All the settings are a one time thing. Hectic at first. But Easy. Peasy. Done.

I know this was a lot to read, but there's a lot of tiddly little stuff to do at first to make money with Blacksmithing in World of Warcraft. Just remember, the key to making gold in the WoW, with or without a billion steps and settings, is just to 
Search. Craft. Post.
Every Day.


Reach me on Twitter @RyanAEckles or on YouTube at OneMinuteRaiding

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Sunday's Week in Review

First off, a huge THANKS to everyone who has been so supportive in my first week of blogging: Jim from PowerWord: Gold, Thairus from CreativeAccounting, Theck from SacredDuty, Nev the AH Addict, and Matthew Thomas from The Creative Craft. Y'all have answered a lot of my noob blogger questions and actually gotten me an audience in a remarkably short time frame. Thanks so much!

THIS WEEK'S POSTS:
TSM for Profitable Blacksmith Transmog Items
Standard Deviation: Rules to Post By
Awww, my first blog post

Follow me on my personal Twitter.
Subscribe to WTBGoldWoW on YouTube, we do raid guides for every raid boss covering every role in 60 seconds. Great for PUGs and LFR.

NEWS AND PATCH CHANGES:
Honestly, didn't want it until I made this picture. Thing looks awesome!
The Undermine Journal tweeted today about Living Steel. In short, the craftable 502 weapons are about to be available, and each one takes 12-18 Living Steel to make. For a decent raiding community, that's immediate increase in demand for living steel in the magnitude of the hundreds and maybe even thousands. For something with a daily cooldown this is a BIG deal and will probably create a huge spike in prices. For my realm, there were about 60 LS up on the auction house all under 450g, the average for the past couple months. So I bought them and reposted for double. Withing 10 minutes, there were another 20 up. So, from what I saw with the 5.2 trillium/ghost iron bar shenanigans, my observation is that we have a few people who have prepared for this and have stockpiled to actively play the LS game. If you play too, and you can buy a couple stacks cheaply now, you'll probably be able sell them one by one over the next week or two for a 25-50% profit. You might get lucky though and have a new tycoon try and control the market and buy out everything for ridiculously high prices trying to post them for more ridiculous prices. While he'll probably get left holding the bag, you'll have a nice little profit. Most markets that I've seen don't have more than 100 LS on them at the moment so you can't really go wrong either way; a 50k investment is not going to be a deal breaker if you have to liquidate. My suggestion then, is to stagger, have two price points, one high and one absurd. Personally, I'm posting half at 600-700g, and another half at 900-1000g. 50% profit and 100% profit. Easy. Done. If things don't sell, then after the dust settles, I'll sell em for market value.

MY STRATEGY (Since I haven't explained it yet)
First off, since I haven't explained this yet, I have two posting toons, one for glyphs and one for BS, JC, Transmog, Enchanting, Mega Blues, Vendor runs, and random resell stuff. I'm still new to the glyph market (she's only lvl 58) but gah! there are so many glyphs! IT'S RIDICULOUS!

To grow my wealth, I grow both my inventory and cash. Money Management is where most people fail and is where I failed initially too. If you find yourself perpetually broke, here's what I recommend. What I do is I set a threshold of gold across all my toons that I never fall below, no matter what opportunities present themselves. I started off with a minimum of 40,000 gold, then bumped that up to 50,000 gold. Then I had one reaaaally good day where I sold a bunch of ore and two 496 pieces, so from then on I kept the mark at 100k. It's been a while at 100k, so I think I'm gonna bump that up this week. Any profit I make, I use to buy underpriced transmogs or materials for profitable crafts. So when I say "Search. Craft. Post. Every Day." That's what I mean. Handle your money responsibly and always be growing with profitable moves.

Anyways, on to the financial recap!

EARNINGS
Since this blog is also going to be used to track my toons personal financial growth, here is this week's breakdown. If you track anything that I don't, that you think I should, let me know. :)

Please don't burn me, ma'am.
Glyph poster: 
Glyph Revenue: 3391g
Average # of Postings: ~300

He's a lumberjack and he's ok.
Main Poster:
Lumberjack Revenue: 68032g
Min # of Postings: 97
Max # of Postings: 437
Average # of Posting: 320

Total Revenue: 71,423g
Avg # of Posting: 620
Revenue per Posting: 115g/post

Total Gold: 109k
Total Value of Auctions: 470k
Total Wealth: 579k


And that's it for this Sunday's week in review. Hope it was helpful, and I'll see you next week. Until then,
Search. Craft. Post.
Every Day.

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Revisiting TSM Blacksmithing Groups: I Can Haz Transmog?

     Welcome back to WTBGold. Today was a quiet Saturday. The missus had to work and I REALLY didn't want to do dailies. So, I decided to do some TSM housecleaning and see if there was anything profitable in my groups that has changed. Turns out, my blacksmith's crafting queue has been missing out!

TSM Tradeskillmaster 2.0 blacksmithing Warcraft transmog
Witch-Hunter's Harvester: 4k profit
Mean-looking equals expensive.

     Until now, I've just been using the blacksmithing section of TradeSkillMaster Crafting to craft the normal end game PVP pieces and a few select PVE 496s when I have the spirits. Usually sell a set or two a day and one 496 a week. However, I haven't been crafting any transmog items. Most of my transmog sales have come from AH flipping using Faid's dealfinding lists that she posted on GoClockworkRiot.com (RIP). Link here. But since when has the most profitable craftable blacksmith item, percentage-wise, been a trasmog piece?

How to make gold with transmog blacksmithing
Crafting Cost 173g   Profit 1836g!    YES. FREAKIN. PLEASE.

     So, for your crafting pleasure, here are the items that I've gone through and included in my new crafting. Some of them have a lot of mats and some of them don't. Some of them make you a hundred gold, some a couple thousand. But all are in the ballpark of a 100% minimum return on investment. I'll make one of everything and update y'all in a week or so based on how quickly things sell, but for now, here's the what I've added. I've also included the number of mats and ROI so you can make up your mind what you want to craft based on what your budget is and what you think your time is worth.

(item name/cost/profit/ROI/#ofMats)

Armor-Chest
Armor-Feet
     Could also include vicious pvp boot, but it only has 100g profit, which while still over 100% profit, isn't worth the time, in my opinion, compared to the rest.

     Note: Tempered Titansteel Treads have a very high mean but a low median. I have excluded them for this reason. For transmog, I base my profit calculations off between 110% and 130% median price, since standard deviation is so crazy in the transmog market. If you try to sell something at the mean of 8,000g when the median is 200g, you'll be sadly disappointed...and broke. For more information on Standard Deviation, read this post.

Armor-Hands
Armor-Head
  • Wildguard Helm 426g / 1125g / 264% / 4
  • (Flamebane Helm is 350g profit, but there are too many lookalikes. If anyone can tell me why it's profitable, let me know and I'll craft it.)
Armor-Legs
Armor-Sheilds

Armor-Waist 
Armor-Wrists
Weapons-OneHanded
Weapons-TwoHanded


     AND THERE YA GO! After a little bit of list reading, hopefully I have helped you make an extra 15,670g more than you would have otherwise. And even more hopefully, that'll be 15k per week. :) Let me know how you did, and if it helped you, help me by sharing and subscribing. If you have any questions, though, feel free to message me on twitter at RyanAEckles, or on YouTube.

No matter what you do though, remember, the key to gold making is to just 
Search. Craft. Post.
Every Day.






Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Standard Deviation, WoW Gold Making, and You!

NOTE: ONLY DOUBLE-DIGIT ADDITION IS INVOLVED IN THIS POST  :)

I’d like to start off the blog with a question many guildies have asked me. On TheUndermine Journal, you may have noticed Standard Deviation listed. Sooooo, what does that mean? I won’t teach you the math, but I will show you how you can use Standard Deviation to save time, money, and prevent noob mistakes. What is it though? As Wikipedia says “For a finite population with equal probabilities at all points, we have:"


the undermine journal standard deviation

Yah, thanks for simplifying for us there, buddy. Big help.

Sure some of us might remember something vaguely from highschool “blah blah square root…blah blah sum of squares.” Don’t worry about it. A big standard deviation means prices are all over the place (think pet or transmog markets), whereas a small standard deviation means everyone agrees where prices should be (ore, herbs, fish). You don’t have to do statistics though to use standard deviation! Nonetheless, memorizing three numbers will earn you a lot of gold that you’ve been giving away: 68, 95, and 99.7 (or if you don't care about rounding, 70%, 95%, and 100%).

Normal Distribution Graph
SCARY GRAPHS!

Let’s explain, by using an example. You ran a few dungeons and have a few stacks of Windwool Cloth that you want out of your bags. You don’t necessarily care what price it sells at, but you still want the most you could get, otherwise, you would just vendor them. Well, how much would it sell at without having to repost? Turns out, Standard Deviation gives you that answer. The Undermine Journal says that the mean price for Cloth on my server is 2g 20s (the “mean” is the average), and that standard deviation is 50s.  Well, here’s where the three numbers from earlier and the ugly graph above come into play. The big middle part makes up about 70% of the graph, and the range of that middle part is the mean plus/minus one standard deviation. In short, 70 percent of the windwool prices will be between 2g20s - 50s = 1g 70s, and 2g20s + 50s = 2g70s (Statistics majors, just shhhh, I know). In other words, you can reasonably expect to be the cheapest at some point soon, if you post in that range. If you for sure want to sell, post on the lower end. If you don’t mind reposting once, post on the higher end. Since you aren’t in a bind, in this example, you just throw it up for 2g 70s and call it a day. Viola! It sells (cause it will) and you make an extra 20-30 gold over what you would have if you just undercut the 2g 20s current market price. Personally, for cheap items, I don’t worry too much about this, but if you were selling an expensive crafted item like a 496 chest piece, you might want to consider the higher end of the spectrum, since someone who is willing to pay 20k will probably also be willing to pay 23k, and capturing that extra 3,000 gold is just smart posting on your part.   

So, you’re saving you time and money from posting within +/- 1 standard deviation. Great! Now, what about preventing noob mistakes? If you had a battle pet listed for 99g, and someone whispered you offering 97g, you’d accept the offer, right? Why? Because 2% doesn’t really matter. People lose a lot of money to 2% though through excessive undercutting.

For this example let’s say you’re a strength user and got some Flasks of the Warm Sun in LFR bags. You need gold fast because you wiped 30 times and don’t have the gold to repair your armor. On my server, these flasks sell for a mean(average) 80g, with a standard deviation of 10g.  Look at the graph above again. The middle part +/-oneSD was 70%. Well, the larger section is +/- twoSD and is 95% of the total, and the largest section is +/-3 SD and is 99.7%. Without going too mathy on you, that means that if you undercut by two SDs, you’ll have almost 100% of the future flasks be more expensive. This means it’ll sell fast; your flasks are the cheapest people will see for a while.

Angry Warcraft Nerd Rage
My assumptions in this post make statistics majors angry. Ignore them.

The thing is though, the chance of it selling are practically the same chance as if you undercutted by more, and yet people undercut for less than 2SDs all the time! Don’t do that! If you just need gold right now, and need something to sell immediately, what this shows is that you never want to undercut by more than two standard deviations, because it will be just as good of a deal for buyers as a bargain basement price where you drop your pants and give away all your profit. Specifically, in the Warm Sun Example selling the Flasks at 70g might take a bit, but 60g would sell just as quickly as 50g.

Takeaways:



  1. Download The Undermine Journal addon.
  2. Try to post between the mean +/- 1 std dev.
  3. For items you don't mind reposting, post at mean+1std dev
  4. Never post for less than mean-2 std dev.


Thanks so much for reading my first real post, I had a blast putting it together, and I look forward to writing more for y’all.

As a bonus, for anyone who retweets this, I’ll show you one-on-one how to automate all this standard deviationing so you don’t have to do the math for every item you try and sell. And remember, while this helps, all you really have to do to make gold is

Search. Craft. Post. Every Day.


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Hey, Everybody! Come see how good I look!

Well hello there. My, don't you look fabulous in that transmog. Tier 8.5? Very nice.

My name's Reckles, I play on US-Tanaris, and this is a new blog dedicated to sharing the gold making strategies I've learned over the years.  Am I an expert on everything? No. Am I an expert on some things? Yeah, probably. I've been playing since Wrath and my shining moment was getting Realm First 90. Oddly enough, the person who I just barely beat in that race is now my GM. Wish me luck! Good news for y'all though, is that he has a few million gold so I'll send some tips your way from him whenever he has a second.
World of Warcraft Realm First Level 90
You say you need a resume, Mr CEO? This jpg should do.

If you're new to the gold making game, read away. I'll start off with the basics so hopefully, you'll learn a lot. If you've been around for awhile, subscribe and read when you feel like it; I studied Economics at Columbia University so I tend to approach WoW from a more analytical angle than most gold bloggers, with a focus on efficiency over than anything else. In other words, if you want to make the most amount of gold for the amount of time you have to play, I should be able to help you. (Mentioning efficiency, I have a youtube channel where I fully explain all raid boss mechanics for all roles in 60 seconds. It's difficult, but a fun challenge, and I appreciate any input:  http://www.youtube.com/user/OneMinuteRaiding )

What to expect coming up:
-I'll post a couple times a week
-I'll start off with individual profession guides
-I never did the "20 days of gold making" and as Faid says, "better late than never." :)
-After all that, I'll start going into more specific topics like when to use Auctioneer vs Auctionator, TSM groups and category customization, what re the best dealfinding lists, and who knows, I may even throw in my two copper on whether or not to undercut in the glyph market.

No matter what though, remember that the best way to make gold is to
Search. Craft. Post. Ever Day.

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